A report by WWF-UK called Travelling Light (http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/travelling_light.pdf) contains interesting information on reducing air travel, and is based on a survey of business in the UK. Business travel is a key component of the total airline footprint. We need businesses to commit to targets to reduce flying - a suitable target would be to reduce the amount of flying by 20%. This could include video conferencing as well as other forms of transport eg trains (if they were faster and more reliable). We also need individuals to commit to reducing their personal flying,but limiting their total distance flown by plane - but I am not sure what that limit should be (especially for Australians!) Having experienced telepresence (only once), I would thoroughly recommend trialling the newer technolgies like videoconferencing (and also skype for one-to-one video meetings).

There is no doubt that being able to create virtual teams anywhere anytime using the rich experience of high definition Video Conferencing, combined with extremely effective modern software collaborative systems will fundamentally change the way we work forever. In 10 years time will look back at what were seemingly normal work practises of past and wonder how we ever managed to get the productively we needed. Being able to create more effective meetings, which focus of productivity rather than activity, will enable key resources to do more without doing more. In the end this will be the big driver as people are still a company’s biggest asset and allowing them to scale up without burning out has got to make good business sense to everyone. Cheers Mike Vallender

People are not taking up LiveMeeting etc more because the customers (certainly mine) require a relationship and getting to know the vendor. Sadly LiveMeeting etc do allow you to communicate and present but the technology inhibits relationship building. Both our North American and Australian clients demand face-to-face meetings. We would like to reduce our cost of sales so I am open to ideas Cheers Aaron Goldwater

In the reference to the "environmental benefits from reduced greenhouse gas emissions" on page 34 it states, for example, "teleworking saved an average of 242kgs of carbon emissions per employee" without providing a time scale over which the savings are made. Can I assume this should be over one year? The reference states, "Teleworking, ..., offers a number of environmental benefits such as reducing travel and associated greenhouse gas emissions." I was wondering if the "specialist environmental modellers" considered any detrimetal effects to the environment of reduced CO2 emissions? Or are there no detrimental environmental effects to reduced CO2 emissions?

Last year within the Telstra Wireless Engineering and Operations group, I piloted the use of LiveMeeting for "virtual class" training with very good results. We were able to host training sessions incorporating operations people from Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Brisbane with live participants in our Melbourne training room. We conducted theory and prac units using LiveMeeting's desktop sharing feature, and each training session was recorded for review and future reference (LiveMeeting has the capability to produce a compressed WMV file which will play in Windows Media Player). This approach reduced or totally removed the travel costs and carbon impacts associated with sending a facilitator and training kit interstate or bringing participants to Melbourne. I am working on refining this delivery format further to incorporate video, and eventually I would like to be able to demonstrate that we can actually deliver this kind of training in a way that is "Carbon Negative" using traditional offset techniques - in other words, the more training we deliver in this way, the more carbon we offset and the cleaner the world becomes!

Hi Turlough, great blog. My husband drives a truck and we know all too well the the effects of fuel prices on consumers and basically anything that needs to be transported. In the way of the future I'd be interested in seeing how conferencing technology is incorporated into homes as a part of family lifestyles. I'm particularly interested in seeing how these technologies effect the way people communicate with friends and family in other countries from their homes. Is there a consumer equivalent to this technology? I was just thinking it might be worth having a launch in highly ethnic regions and semi-rural regions purely to be used as a social tool. I anticipate that at some stage I'd be able to use video conferencing technology to select my curtains & carpets from interstate or global suppliers, pay for them through the same application & share a copy of the contact with my girlfriends that are also renovating. It would certainly beat spending time in traffic and paying more for fuel. I'd be able to see the items and have a discussion with the representative, show them the interior of my house, get their recommendations and ge tthem to show me their range then & there. Ah, the possiblities... :) Thanks again Turlough!

Wow! There are so many insightful comments so far and more questions - I'll start working my way through responding to each. Peter - the WWF's Travelling Light study is great. I am encouraged to see that almost 90% of FTSE 350 companies recognise that video conferencing can improve their productivity. Telstra, like the 75% of companies in your study believe that the government should be encouraging investment in video conferencing. The roll-out of a high speed broadband network across Australia (or NBN) would enable such investment in high quality video conferencing and other fuel and electricity saving applications.

Telstra is committed to responsible business practices toward sustainability and are working toward successfully embedding sustainability into our core business processes. A recent robust Online Billing Life Cycle Analysis has found that Online Billing has a lower environmental impact than Paper Billing. Currently, we have approx 38,000 employees of which only approx 2,500 are Online Billing paper off, the plan is to move all Telstra Staff to OLB with paper off Staff Paper Off demonstrates that Telstra, a large corporation do not "dodge" difficult or uncomfortable issues, this along with the environmental impact report outcome should be communicated to our customers, and staff using methods such as our IVR's.

Aaron - Perhaps there is a case for more "enlightened" service providers such as yourself, who get the value of virtual meetings, to challenge the mindsets of your customers. I know having worked in the mining and petroleum industry myself that face-2-face was the best way. This will be a major cultural shift for these industries. Perhaps for the 2nd and later meetings with clients they would be amenable to a virtual collaboration over the internet. Rose - these suggestions represent the types of lifestyle changes we can all make with the smart use of telecommunications technology. With your 3G phone you can do most of the the things you suggested already but let me chase up your query with experts in Telstra who support the conumer segments.

Mannie - The teleworking study reported savings from travel only over a year. When we consider the effects of consolidation of office space as a result of teleworking, as well as travel, the savings increase to 1600 kg (or 1.6 tonnes). If the outcomes of the Teleworking Life Cycle Analysis study were applied across the working population of Australia (assuming 5 per cent of the working population work remotely), almost one million tonnes of greenhouse gases can be eliminated. This is consistent with the findings from the report Towards a High-Bandwidth, Low-Carbon Future (see the full reprot on Telstra.com). On your other comment, I don't think anyone is too concerned about the impacts of reduced CO2. Crop production actually increases with increased CO2 concencentrations but there are more problems from increased CO2 ie global warming effects!